Amartya Sen profiled by the Guardian’s Global Development

OPHI advisor Amartya Sen, the Nobel laureate in economics, has been profiled on the Guardian’s Global Development website.

The profile details some of Sen’s most influential work, including his writing on famines, which he argues are rarely the result of a lack of food; his Tanner lectures of the mid-1980s, in which he argues that freedom is not itself free of an individual’s capability or desire to use it to any particular end; and his 1999 book ‘Development as Freedom’, in which he argues that the expansion of freedom is central to development.

Sen, who teaches philosophy and economics at Harvard University, is described as being very close to embodying the human development position better than anyone else.

“He has had the greatest intellectual influence on its arguments, while the longevity of his career and the magnitude of his contributions across a wide spectrum of issues – covering choice theory in economics to philosophical interventions on the idea of justice itself – have taken such arguments well beyond questions of economic development,” the profile states.